The US government just released its most aggressive AI strategy yet: a sweeping document titled America’s AI Action Plan that doesn’t mince words.
The goal? Nothing short of achieving and maintaining “unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance” in artificial intelligence.
The 28-page document released by The White House sets out policy recommendations “that this Administration can deliver for the American people to achieve the President’s vision of global AI dominance.”
It outlines a vision for doing that over three pillars, and it’s about way more than faster chatbots or better productivity tools. The policy recommendations amount to a full-throttle national mobilization to outpace rivals like China across every dimension of AI: innovation, infrastructure, and international influence. And it’s got the backing of President Trump himself.
So what exactly is in this action plan? And what does it signal about where the US is headed?
I broke it all down with Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer on Episode 159 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.
A Strategy Rooted in Power—and Urgency
From the very first page, the tone is clear. AI is no longer seen as a novel frontier. It’s a battlefield.
The preface, signed by President Trump, casts AI as the next great technological contest, declaring:
“As our global competitors race to exploit these technologies, it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”
That framing echoes throughout the document across three main pillars of policy recommendations:
- Accelerate AI Innovation
- Build American Infrastructure
- Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security
Each is packed with dozens of policy actions aimed at deregulating the private sector, supercharging domestic AI buildouts, and limiting China’s access to advanced compute and chips.
“Build, Baby, Build”
One of the clearest themes? Speed and scale over environmental caution.
The action plan explicitly calls for combatting “radical climate dogma” to provide AI with enough energy and fast-tracking permits for data centers, semiconductor factories, and energy projects. (The document even contains the rallying cry: “Build, Baby, Build.”)
Roetzer notes the stark contrast to previous federal guidance.
“Forget any impact on the environment,” he says. “If it has to do with energy or data centers, we are building it and we are going to win in that space.
“You can’t read this and expect any consideration for AI’s environmental impact. It’s just not part of the equation,” he says.
Instead, the focus is on unleashing vast amounts of energy and infrastructure. The administration even invokes Jensen Huang’s framing of AI factories—energy-fed data centers that churn out tokens (i.e., model outputs) as a new kind of industrial production line.
The demand is clearly there. In a recent Alphabet earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is processing nearly one quardrillion tokens per month, which is nearly double what was announced at Google’s I/O conference in May.
An AI Workforce, Ready or Not
Despite its aggressive industrial posture, the action plan does acknowledge AI’s impact on workers—at least on paper.
It calls for:
- Expanding AI literacy programs
- Funding tax-free retraining efforts
- Evaluating job displacement using federal labor data
But don’t expect any administration to come out and be fully honest about AI’s potential for job disruption.
“No administration in the United States can admit that jobs are going to be replaced,” says Roetzer. If the US government comes out and says ‘It’s actually just gonna replace millions of jobs, then they would have an uproar and they would lose the next election cycle.'”
Instead, the plan offers a vision where AI complements, rather than replaces, human work. A nice sentiment, but one that sidesteps the deeper reckoning many experts believe is coming, says Roetzer.
Still, he sees the policy language as a step in the right direction.
Free Speech and the Battle Over Truth
One of the most contentious pieces of the plan? A section dedicated to ensuring AI models are “free from ideological bias” and “designed to pursue objective truth rather than social engineering agendas.”
That sounds noble. Until you read the details.
The executive order backing this section warns against large language models promoting concepts like DEI and explicitly bans any federal AI contracts with model providers that don’t adhere to the administration’s definition of neutrality.
In other words: Only train your AI on what we consider the truth.
Roetzer warns this opens a dangerous door.
“Whatever this administration decides, the next administration gets to build off of those principles,” he says. “So if the next administration decides America has different values or free speech means something different, understand that that shifts the context of this conversation.”
He points out that this isn’t unique to one party. Whoever controls the models in this way controls how we think and talk about certain viewpoints, perspectives, and facts.
But Will It Work?
From a purely strategic lens, there’s no question this is a deeply informed, well-researched plan, says Roetzer.
It checks all the boxes:
- Massive infrastructure investments
- Deregulation for rapid innovation
- Strategic export controls
- Workforce development (at least on paper)
- National security posture with AI at the center
But it also leaves key questions unanswered—especially around how truth is defined, who gets displaced, and what kind of AI future we’re actually building.
Roetzer doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. But he’s clear about one thing:
“This is all about power and controlling AI,” he says. “It’s believed these things will drive trillions of dollars of economic impact.”
